I have a number of open-source projects that have gotten some significant usage and would like to find co-maintainers so that I am not a bottleneck when it comes to maintenance and support requests and to get other perspectives on how the project should evolve.

Where should I look for co-maintainers, what should I look for in a co-maintainer, and how should I go about bringing them up to speed on the code and maintainer responsibilities?

As it currently stands, this question is not a good fit for our Q&A format. We expect answers to be supported by facts, references, or expertise, but this question will likely solicit debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion. If you feel that this question can be improved and possibly reopened, visit the help center for guidance.
If this question can be reworded to fit the rules in the help center, please edit the question.

3 Answers
3

I think that you should probably start by looking for people to contribute patches to the project(s) first. That way you get an idea how good they are as coders and whether or not you trust them enough to want them as a co-maintainer.

Something I've seen discussed on the mailing lists for Debian is the idea of making small, simple, bite-sized tasks, so that people can easily get their feet wet. The idea is that some programmer who uses your project will stop by the website, see that something simple needs doing and think to themselves, "Hey, I can do that, that's easy."

You could post notification on your projects site about wanting more contributors. If you get a lot of usage but no contributions, one reason could also be that there is difficulty in getting to know the project. Is the project easy to build? Is it easy to get to know the code? Is architecture and conventions of the codebase documented etc.

If your projects are based on Microsoft technologies you could also try posting on Project Openings on CodePlex